Am I delusional ?

Delusion has a branding problem. The word arrives judged. It carries with it images of denial, of blindness, of people disconnected from reality. It is a diagnosis handed down by those who believe they see clearly. But clarity is a strange thing. It tends to belong to the majority. And the majority, by definition, works within what already exists. So it is worth asking; quietly, without the noise of immediate dismissal, what exactly is being labeled as delusion?

At its core, delusion is nothing more than a belief, a conviction that refuses to bend even when the surrounding environment offers zero validation. There is no applause on the contrary one might receive brickbats. So it is, in some sense, a private alignment, a belief in a future that has not yet materialised. This is where things get uncomfortable. Why ? because if you look closely, this is the pattern that shows up in every place where something genuinely new was attempted. Not when something was optimised. Not when something was improved incrementally. But when something was imagined into existence. The early stages of any original idea look indistinguishable from error. There is no data. No proof. No guarantees. Only a direction and a stubborn insistence to move toward it. Which, from the outside, looks like delusion.

I have lived on both sides of that line. There was a time when I stepped into entrepreneurship with a certain quiet certainty. Just an internal sense that something could be built, something meaningful. The kind of belief that doesn’t ask for permission. And then, reality, as it tends to do; pushed back hard. Things did not unfold the way they were supposed to. Effort did not translate cleanly into outcomes. There were wins, yes. Moments that felt like validation. But they were not enough to sustain the trajectory. Eventually, the weight of the system, clients, cash flows, constraints all of it settled in. From the outside, it would be easy to summarise that phase as failure. And maybe it was by certain definitions. What is less visible is what it took internally, to continue showing up, to continue believing that something would work even when evidence was thin at best; that required a certain kind of mental posture. A willingness to hold onto an idea longer than was comfortable. A kind of… delusion.

Then came the long stretch of structure. Over twenty years of being within systems that were already defined. Roles that had clarity. Expectations that were mapped out. Feedback loops that were immediate and measurable. There is a certain relief in that world. You do not have to invent the path. You only have to walk it well. And over time, something subtle happens. The edges soften. The instinct to question weakens, not because it disappears, but because it becomes less necessary. The system rewards alignment, not divergence. You learn to operate within reality as it is presented. Which is useful. Efficient, even. But it comes at a cost.

The part of the mind that once entertained improbable ideas begins to quiet down. Not out of inability, but out of disuse.

And then, unexpectedly, the circle bends again. Joining a startup after all these years is not a logical progression. It does not fit neatly into the narrative of stability or predictability. If anything, it reintroduces uncertainty in its rawest form. Which raises an uncomfortable question: why should I step back into something that previously did not work out? The safe answer would be experience. Or timing. Or better judgment. But the more honest answer is simpler. Because my original instinct never really left. That small, persistent voice that says—there is something here worth pursuing, even if it is not fully visible yet. And that voice does not speak the language of certainty. It does not present spreadsheets or projections. It does not argue in bullet points. It simply insists. That insistence has always been there. Before the first attempt. During the failures. Through the years of structured work. It just got quieter when it was ignored. Not anymore. 

So maybe the problem is not delusion itself, but our relationship with it. We have been trained to treat belief as something that must be justified externally. That conviction requires evidence. That persistence must be rational. But reverse that for a moment if you could; Assume that every meaningful shift begins without sufficient evidence—then what we call delusion starts to look less like a flaw and more like a precursor. A necessary imbalance. Because reality, as we experience it, is always a lagging indicator. It reflects what has already been accepted, built, or proven. It does not account for what is still forming. So anyone attempting to move ahead of that curve must, by definition, operate without full validation. They must hold a belief that reality has not yet caught up with. It is indistinguishable from delusion. The difference, perhaps, lies not in the presence of that belief, but in how it is held.

Unchecked delusion—one that refuses feedback entirely, that ignores all signals, that isolates itself from reality- it will be destructive. It becomes rigid. Fragile in its own way. But harnessed delusion is different. It listens, but does not surrender. It adapts, but does not abandon. It allows reality to shape the path, but not to define the destination entirely. It is a dynamic tension.

Maybe that is the real skill; to know when to persist and when to pivot, without losing the core belief that started the journey. Looking back, the failure in entrepreneurship was not a complete negation. It was a data point. A harsh one, perhaps, but still just one point in a longer arc. The years in structured roles were not a detour either. They were an accumulation. Of understanding, of discipline, of perspective. And stepping into a startup again is not a repetition. It is a continuation, with more awareness, but the same underlying willingness to believe in something not yet fully visible.

So perhaps the goal is not to eliminate delusion, but to refine it. To recognise it as a raw form of conviction, unpolished, sometimes inconvenient, often misunderstood. So question it, yes. But don’t discard it at the first sign of resistance. Because if everything you believe is immediately validated by the world around you, then you are not really believing anything new. You are simply agreeing.

And agreement rarely builds anything that didn’t already exist.

C